Facebook Timeline Complete Guide

Facebook Timeline is the new profile look that Facebook has unleashed upon its users. If you don’t have it yet and Facebook didn’t already impose it on you, here’s a small guide on how to activate it: How to get Facebook Timeline.

If you’re still determined to keep using Facebook, you need to learn how to properly manage the new Facebook Timeline because otherwise it may become a stalker’s paradise! Or it can be just an endless source of humor: you being mocked by all of your Facebook friends for some stupid picture or post you had 6 months ago…

Bottom line: You have to know how to use the new Facebook Timeline and you have to make sure NOT to share the wrong data with the wrong people!

So enough chit-chat, here we go:

Table of Contents:

Facebook Timeline Cover Photo

The first thing to deal with once you get the Timeline is the Cover Photo, that will sit from now on on top of our timeline. The Facebook Timeline Cover Photo is the first thing people will see when they get on your profile. You can use an existent photo from one of your albums or upload a picture especially for this. With little skill and a bit of creativity you may welcome your new stalkers, ah I mean visitors, in style ;)

Here’s what few others did:

In case you want to do play with your new cover, here is all the data you need to know:

Facebook Timeline Navigation

Right under your Cover Photo you may now find few boxes with your friends, photos, all of your likes, all the applications you’ve installed and other crap. And on the right you may now see the actual “Timeline Navigation”:

Click on it or scroll down to see most if not all of your posts, picture and events from the moment you joined Facebook.. here’s where the fun begins.

You can choose to see all of the events posted or just the highlights, the most important ones:

It can be useful when you don’t want to see everything or in the contrary you want to see all the post on it.

You can of course still add new posts, from Status updates to Images and Life Events:

And you may add these new posts on top of the Timeline or at any date you choose too. It’s a bit like going back in time. All you have to do is go to that exact point in time and if you hover on the blue timeline bar in the middle, you will see a small “+”. Click it and you’ll be on your way :

A very important feature in viewing your new Facebook Timeline is the “View As” button:

This will show you how your timeline would look to the rest of your world. You can even choose a specific friend or family member’s perspective to know exactly what he/she can see on your profile. This is to avoid some of those awkward discussions with your parents after the latest party pictures surfaced ;)

Editing the Timeline

Now once that you have identified the compromising pictures or drunken posts, all you have to do is hide it from the face of the world (well actually just from Facebook, and that only until they will get some privacybug that might post all of these all over again..)

On the top right of every posts you can find these buttons:

You may:

- “Star” a post – making it bigger, 2 columns wide bigger that means.

- “Change date” – it will move that post to the date you change it too..

- “Hide from Timeline” – his will NOT delete the post, it will just hide it from your timeline. The post will still be visible in your friends feed( or depending on the privacy settings for that post)

- “Delete from Timeline“. This will delete the post, image or event from the timeline.

Facebook Timeline Privacy

Now pay extra atention because the most important things you need to know about the new Facebook Timeline are the privacy elements.

In kinda the same way you edit the posts you can also edit who do you share it with:

This is how you can control how each post can be seen by the rest of the word.

An additional help would be here if you have already divided your friends intro Friend Lists. Facebook gives you the ability to organize your friends into lists. It can be extremely helpful, for example to share a post just with your “neighbors” list only or create a party event and share with everyone except the “idiot friends I never talk to” list.

So now that you got the hang of it, you could go and edit all of these posts, well the hundreds or even thousands you may have depending on how active or very active Facebook user you are.. OR use a little privacy trick to at least change all public posts to “Friends Only” sharing setting.

If you have any old posts that are either public or shared with “friends of friends” you can change the privacy for all of them (if you want, of course) to “Friends Only” with just one single click:

- Click on the arrow button nex to the Home button on the top right of your Facebook page:

- Select Privacy Settings

- Scroll down to “Limit the Audience for Past Posts” and select “Limit Old Posts”:

This is one of the fastest ways to bring back some security to your Facebook life.

Also now that you’re here, you may explore more of your privacy settings, especially the:

“Control Your Default Privacy” section:

Here you may choose how your posts will be shown by default, share it with the world, or just a small set of your friends.

There are few other cool tricks you can do here:

Making your Timeline Posts Private – make it that nobody can post anything on your Timeline, except for yourself of course.You can do that by going again to “Privacy Settings” – “How You Connect”.

Once there, go to “Who can post on your timeline”:

This is a good way to expect no surprises from “dear” and “loving” friends.

Or you may allow them to post but don’t let anyone see it.. well expect you or the people you choose. You do this by going to the same “Privacy Settings” – “How You Connect” and select the last option: “Who can see posts by others on your timeline?”

Use the “How Tags Work” section if you want control over what pictures or posts you will tagged in by other people and also who can view this.

“Apps and Websites” are the place to make sure no pesky application gets more data than they are required, also this is the right place to stop any of those that are spamming or annoying you.Facebook introduced a new concept the “Frictionless Sharing”. This means sharing your non-Facebook web activity with your Facebook friends BUT without your explicit permission:

As you may see I was watching a movie on Dailymotion, and it was automatically posted on the Facebook news ticker. Yeah, creepy as hell! All you have to do is view an article, play a video and not pay to much attention to the privacy settings for this feature, and voilà, everything you do shows up on Facebook.

So if you want to “silence” any application that did this to you, this is the place for it.

Take your sweet time and explore all of these privacyfeatures as it may at least, save you a lot of embarasment.

Better to be safe than.. sorry!

Facebook Activity Log

On the top of your timeline, next to the “View As” button is the “Activity log” button.

This will take you to a new window where you may see all of your activity, every comment you ever made, every photo you tagged, every little crap you “liked”.

But don’t worry, this is a part that only YOU can see, none of your friends or visitors can see this.
It’s a good place to check you did nothing stupid, or nobody else used your Facebook account.

Since I don’t want you dosing off, I’ll leave it to this. If you’re going to follow this small Facebook Timeline guide you should be safe, well actually as safe as Facebook allows it;)

thank you so much, you and this other article that linda wrote on her blog, was a big help.
i learned how to turn off the “subscribers” thing so that no one can subscribe to me after they made a friend request, that was funny, i get a friend request that i refused and they end up in my subscribers list.

and from you i learned to turn off “all app plat forms” and limit old post and couple of other things.

one horrible time consuming thing i would segest to every one is this , i only say “time consuming” because people are not like me, so for me it was never a time consuming thing, ha ha .

is before you switch over to timeline(while its still on option mode, wink wink)
is to delete everything off your wall, and i do mean EVERYTHING off your wall.

for some people it might take a whole month , gosh , its true.

i always delete everything off my wall , except for one post, i leave the most recent post on my wall. i do this once a week or once every 2 weeks .

thats why i love the new timeline, cuz i was smart in cleaning my wall clean.

but hey that me , cant help it.

and thank you so much.

P.S. i also tweaked all my account and privacy settings before i made the switch to the timeline thing, and then i went over everything again 5 days later after the switch , and then again after i read your article and linda’s blog on it.

Hey Lauren, I tried to do it, and it worked for the friend, but not for the “view as” feature. Log out and than log in again. When checking the “view as” after that it only shows the common friends between me and that friend. “Surprising” Facebook still has a lot of quirks to work out for this new Timeline also:)

I still can’t figure out how to hide when I “like” a photo or comment on the new timeline layout. It shows up on the newsfeed and on the ticker. I go to the activity log and my only option is to “unlike” it.

when i`m coneccted to my acount the green button with get timeline dosen`t apear if i log out this buton apears; what is the problem? i tried to get it by going on my friends pages witch have time line and nothing …..? what`s the problem.
on another acount io get it from my friend facebook by cliking try timeline; why now it dosen`t work ?

I was wondering if you know of any way to block or restrict friends from seeing every single comment I make after THEY add me to THEIR “Close Friends” list.
It is creepy when a friend makes a comment to me about something I’ve said to someone that they’re not even friends with!

Hey, unfortunately there not much you can do, if he is on your friend list, he can see a lot of the things you are doing..
What you can do is hide your status updates or pictures, but only the ones you post..

hi, thank you for the post. Could you please explain more how to hide my comments on someone else posts from my timeline?
I just made a discovery that every comment I make on facebook is secretly posted on my timeline, well, secretly to me, but public to everyone else… I can’t see those posts on my timeline and hide them but my friends can. it’s my business page and some of the comments I make are not exactly what I’d like to share with my prospective customers – they were only meant for people I commented to! I was able to view and delete my comments from the activity log but it’s not fair – that I can’t comment without it being plastered all over my timeline…

I have read blog after blog and forum after forum and still feel lost so I must apologize before I ask you this question just in case you have already answered it before and I missed it…I don’t want anyone that is not my friend to see anything on my time line. How to I hide ALL on my timeline without having to go to each post? In other words if you decided to search my name and find my fb page, I want you to only see my current profile pic, my cover photo and maybe mutual friends if we have any…PLEASE HELP. I am beyond aggravated :(

I notice that Facebook is now cunningly upgrading profiles to Timeline when the user adds a particular app or other such innocent procedure. So my question is this: What precautions can I take to make sure that there is no way I could “accidentally” upgrade to Timeline? In other words how can I avoid the increasing likelihood of Facebook’s sneakily upgrading me while I’m not looking?

Well you can only avoid it for so long.. Soon Facebook will update all user profiles. To try your best to extend your non timeline profile, don’t install any new applications on your profile. Some use timeline features and will cause an upgrade (they don’t usually mention that :D)

Vec I was wondering if you could help with this. I have a few status and pictures public on my page but the like option is not available to those who are not my “friend”. The only option available to them is “share”. I was wondering if there was a way so the like option would be available to all to use for all my public posts.

I wan’t to hide the comments I make on friend’s pictures from everyone else. Before timeline, I would make a comment and then “run” back to my profile to delete this activity so that it will no longer appear on my friend’s newsfeeds, but now when I make a comment on someone’s picture, it doesn’t show up on my timeline profile or on MY newsfeed, but it does show up on my friends’ newsfeed. I am aware that it does show up on my activity log, but from there it doesn’t give me the option to hide this activity it only gives me the option to delete the comment all together. How can I keep my comment activity from my friends’ newsfeed? Keep in mind. I don’t want to hide all comments, just the ones I make on other people’s timelines or pictures. I don’t want to hide the comments that OTHERS make on my timeline.

Hey, I understand what you want to do, unfortunately the only solution i know, is that you have to go to those exact comment you made and manually deleting them.. There is no other method that Facebook will currently provide you with!

When i comment on any pic of mine, it only shows in my timeline and not in my friends newsfeed. Even when i comment on my status after updating it, it never shows on their newsfeed. Though mt privacy settings has been saved to “friends”. they only see the pic when i upload it but later on when i comment on it, they don’t see it in their newsfeed.
how do i show my comments in my friend’s newsfeed